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Tag Archives: 100 Hundred Years of Solitude

I recently listened to Gabriel García Márquez’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech for100 Hundred Years of Solitude from 1982. His words were eloquent and his description of this spectacular work seemed to, not only provide insight into its essence, but also, into our individual lives. I felt like sharing a transcription of a paragraph from his acceptance speech and two videos of Gabo to celebrate him as a gift to humanity.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: [translated] “The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway. I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.” From Gabriel García Márquez’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1982